Dr. Shakeel Afridi

After Capitol HIll collectively expressed considerable outrage, the Senate Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to cut $33 million from Pakistan’s foreign aid package — $1 million for each year of the sentence against the doctor, Shakeel Afridi. The reduction comes on top of the more than 50 percent of the aid a Senate panel cut earlier this week.

But the U.S. State Department didn’t ramp up its rhetoric so dramatically, maintaining its position that Afridi is detained without basis. A spokesperson said the U.S. will continue to let the Pakistani government know about that position. The softer line might reflect the possibility that Afridi’s verdict could easily be overturned.

Afridi, who ran a vaccination drive to collect data that the U.S. has credited with helping to find Bin Laden, was tried under a British colonial-era law that does not carry a death penalty, according to the New York Times. (The L.A. Times reported that “Afridi could have been given the death penalty.”) Having never approved of his detention, however, the U.S. still objected to the sentence. Asked about the issue yesterday, spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said:

We will – we continue to see no basis for Dr. Afridi to be held….

I think we’ve said that we don’t see any basis for what’s happened here, and so we will continue to make those representations to the Government of Pakistan.

Watch the video:

In February, Clinton said of Afridi: “His work on behalf of the effort to take down Bin Laden was in Pakistan’s interests as well as in America’s.” On CBS’s 60 Minutes in January, Panetta was more outspoken on the matter, calling actions against Afridi a “real mistake on their part” and crediting his help and making a case similar to Clinton’s:

This was an individual who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation. He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan, he was not in any way doing anything that would have undermined Pakistan. As a matter of fact, Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism.

A Pakistani lawyer speaking to CNN said it was likely the case could be overturned — something Nuland subtly alluded to in the briefing when she said the legal process wasn’t necessarily complete. The lawyer, Shahzad Akbar, said that the tribal court is not based in Abbottabad, the site of the bin Laden raid. He told CNN: “If this punishment is challenged by Dr. Afridi’s family in the Superior Court of Pakistan, there is a good possibility that the sentence will be turned around.“

Osama Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan

Since the ad appeared, Romney, his surrogates, and so-called independent groups like the nouvelle swift-boaters have all rehashed the same dubious line in Romney’s defense: That any American president (or “any thinking American“) would have ordered the bin Laden raid. Just last night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show, Romney yet again issued this defense:

ROMNEY: But if the president wants to remind people of his decision, well, that’s entirely appropriate. But I think it was a big mistake for the president to try to make in this a political event by suggesting that I would not have done the same thing. I mean, frankly, Sean, almost any American in the position of presidency hearing that Osama bin Laden could have been taken out would have certainly pressed the button and said: get rid of the guy.

HANNITY: Oh, absolutely.

ROMNEY: And of course I would have.

Watch the video:

However, Romney and his allies’ repeated responses to the ad that “any thinking American” would have ordered the raid don’t account for the actual events surrounding Obama’s call.

In an analogous choice in 2005, George W. Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to strike at senior Al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan because of the potential risk to relations with the notoriously sensitive country. When Obama said in his first presidential campaign that he would strike in Pakistan to get bin Laden, McCain criticized him as irresponsible. Romney echoed this concern when he said in August 2007, “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours.”

On right, Fakhra Younus with supporter Tehmina Durrani

The Global Post describes the circumstances of the attack:

In 1998, Younus was an 18-year-old working in Karachi’s red light district when she met Bilal Khar, the son of politically powerful Ghulam Mustafa Khar. The two married after six months, the Express Tribune reported. But Khar was verbally and physically abusive. Younus eventually left him.

Younus claimed that she was sleeping at her mother’s house in May 2000 when Khar entered and poured acid on her. Her 5-year-old son from a different man witnessed the attack as well, the Associated Press reported.

Pakistani writer and activist Tehmina Durrani wrote that Younus’ attack was the worst she’d ever seen: “I have met many acid victims. Never have I seen one as completely disfigured as Fakhra. She had not just become faceless; her body had also melted to the bone.”

Khar was acquitted in the crime. The AP reports that “many believe he used his connections to escape the law’s grip — a common occurrence in Pakistan.”

In her suicide note, Younus said she was taking her own life because of the silence of law on the atrocities and the insensitivity of Pakistani rulers.

“The saddest part is that she realized that the system in Pakistan was never going to provide her with relief or remedy,” Nayyar Shabana Kiyani, an activist at The Aurat Foundation, told the AP. “She was totally disappointed that there was no justice available to her.”

In an interview after Younus’s death, Khar again denied that he was responsible for the acid attack, saying that a man with the same name committed the crime. And he criticized the media for bringing up the matter. “You people should be a little considerate,” said Khar. “I have three daughters and when they go to school people tease them.”

Drone operators fly missions over Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Pakistan and Iraq from bases in Nevada and California. The study — conducted by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio — found that frequent shift-changes, “mind numbing” monotony, and increasing workloads contributed to the heightened stress levels. Between 65 and 70 percent of drone operators with symptoms of mental illness were not seeking treatment.

The dramatic growth in the use of drones in recent years has led the Air Force to increase the number of drone pilots but the ratio of pilots to drones remains low. The Pentagon has about 7,000 aerial drones and about 1,100 drone pilots. “There’s just not enough people,” Wayne Chappelle, an Air Force psychologist who helped conduct a six-month study of drone operators from 2010 to 2011, told USA Today. “You have to constantly sustain a high level of vigilance, both visual and auditory information, and that would be really tough to do when there’s a lot of monotony.”

While Lt. Gen. Larry James, Air Force deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, told USA Today that he didn’t think instances of pilot error could attributed to high stress levels among drone operators, instances of pilot error and civilian deaths have increased as drone mission over Afghanistan and Pakistan increase.

In April, a Predator done killed a Marine and a medic in what appeared to be the first case of “friendly fire” from a drone. And in late October, the drone program drew more negative publicity after 16-year-old Tariq Aziz and his cousin were killed in a drone strike one day after attending a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting, to discuss the impact of drone strikes on communities in Pakistan.

Last night’s passage of the Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA) in the House will bring with it new conditions on how the U.S. provides assistance to Pakistan through the two primary Pakistan-specific military aid accounts. With U.S.-Pakistan relations still in crisis from a November 26 cross-border raid which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, these changes have drawn fresh critiques from the Pakistani foreign office. But while congressional patience with Pakistan is clearly wearing thin and mutual distrust between the two countries is rising, the conditions in the Defense Authorization bill are actually rather muted.

The authorization won’t actually release the money for the fiscal year, which technically started in October — that comes through appropriations, which have yet to pass as the House and Senate engage in a fight over an omnibus spending package. That bill is likely to introduce new certification requirements as well, but without the final conference text it is unclear at this point how Congress will come down in terms of exact restrictions. For now, the new Defense Authorization bill would make the following changes to the two main Pakistan-specific aid accounts controlled by the Department of Defense — the Coalition Support Fund (CSF) and the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund (PCF):

• Coalition Support Funds — The bill renews the CSF program for another year and increases its annual budget slightly to $1.69 billion; the administration had requested $1.75 billion. As a reimbursement program, CSF depends on Pakistani claims to determine how much is actually paid out. In recent years the U.S. has been more stringent in how it scrutinizes those claims. There are no conditions on CSF spending, but the bill does require a report from the Pentagon to Congress on how CSF money is being used and an assessment of its effectiveness.

• Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund — The bill renews the PCF but for the first time places limits on its disbursement. Sixty percent of the funds appropriated (which would be approximately $660 million if the administration’s $1.1 billion request for PCF is met by Congressional appropriators, not $700 million as some accounts have reported) are frozen until the Defense Department submits a report to Congress outlining what Pakistan’s counterinsurgency capability needs actually are and how the fund will be used, among other issues. The report must also include “a discussion” of Pakistani cooperation in counter-IED efforts; fertilizer from Pakistan is reportedly a component in many Afghan bombs. The remaining 40 percent of PCF money (approximately $400 million) is free to be spent in the meantime. Beyond the submission of the report there are no further restrictions on its use.

When this money is appropriated, it’s an open question how much the U.S. will actually be able to spend, even discounting these constraints. The freezing of $800 million in combined CSF and PCF funds earlier this summer was forced to a considerable degree by the Pakistani ejection of almost all U.S. trainers from the country in the wake of the Raymond Davis episode at the beginning of the year. It will be a challenge to actually spend even $400 million over the year without any actual trainers in Pakistan to spend it on, so the practical effect of the new Congressional restrictions (should the administration choose to trigger them by withholding reports or certification) may be limited.

The most curious thing about McCain’s argument, though, is that the anecdote he delivered in support of it didn’t bolster the case for, as he claimed to put it, maintaining U.S. troops through the “fighting season,” the warmer months when there tends to be more fighting. But rather, McCain made the case for the U.S. to stay in Afghanistan for a very, very long time.

McCain relied on the usual conservative trope that Obama should have deferred to the generals on his withdrawal decision — despite the chain of command (which the generals themselves understand well) and McCain’s own selective reliance on the brass’ word. But he had a twist: He posited that the end of the war would come when the Taliban insurgency acquiesced to the terms of a peace deal. This, his story suggested, would never happen if the U.S. leaves.

Here’s McCain’s story about an unnamed former George W. Bush administration official:

A story was related to me just recently. Former member of the previous administration, high ranking, in a meeting with one of the highest ranking members of the government of Pakistan. He said, to this high-ranking government official, “What do you think the chances of peace with the Taliban are?” That individual just laughed and said, “Why should they make peace? You are leaving.” Those are fundamental facts.

Watch the video of McCain on the floor of the Senate here:

But McCain’s anecdote isn’t about staying through this “fighting season,” as he claims commanders on the ground advocated for, with the Obama administration setting the partial drawdown timeline for a few months earlier. Rather, McCain’s statement that the Taliban won’t make peace because the U.S. is leaving applies just as much to the middle of the “fighting season” as it does the end of the “fighting season.” Instead, McCain’s anecdote seems to call for a heavy, long-term military presence, perhaps an interminable one. After all, according to McCain’s story, no peace deal can be made to end the Afghanistan war if the U.S. leaves. Perhaps that’s why, over McCain’s objections, the amendment to expedite the Afghanistan withdrawal passed the Senate.

Indeed, like in Afghanistan, if McCain had his way in Iraq, American troops would be there for at least 97 more years, instead of coming home by the end of this month.

CNN fact checks Bachmann’s claim. While their report doesn’t confirm whether the sites were nuclear facilities, CNN says her assertion is “misleading” because the attacks “do not appear to have been attempts to seize the country’s nuclear weapons.”

While the Atlantic reported recently that the six facilities Bachmann is presumably referring to are “widely believed to be associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program,” the National Journal’s Yochi Dreazen notes: “U.S. intelligence and military officials believe that Pakistan has 15 nuclear sites, but no U.S. official has publicly said that all of the sites were vulnerable to militant attack or confirmed that any of them had previously come under any form of jihadist attack.”

The move has been greeted with ridicule and derision, particularly by Pakistan’s vociferous users of internet forums and micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

Since the PTA’s lists of offensive English and Urdu words and terms – containing 1,106 and 586 items respectively – became public a few days ago, it has become the butt of jokes on the web.

While the English list has 148 items containing a four-letter swear word, it has had many scratching their heads by including words and terms like athlete’s foot, deposit, black out, drunk, flatulence, glazed donut, harem, Jesus Christ, hostage, murder, penthouse, Satan and “flogging the dolphin”.

Homosexuality is “punishable by whipping, imprisonment or death” and the country does not provide any discrimination protections on the basis of sexual identity or orientation or recognize same-sex civil unions or marriages. In July, conservative Islamic political and religious officials condemned a gay rights meeting being held at the U.S. Embassy as “cultural terrorism” against the country. “Such people are the curse of society and social garbage,” the Islamic officials said. “They don’t deserve to be Muslim or Pakistani, and the support and protection announced by the U.S. administration for them is the worst social and cultural terrorism against Pakistan.”

Aftermath of a drone stike

Romney made the assertion in the following exchange with debate moderator Scott Pelley:

ROMNEY: Right now they’re comfortable with our using drones to go after the people who are representing the greatest threat. I would continue to do that.

PELLEY: Are the Pakistanis ‘comfortable’ with us using drones?

ROMNEY: We have agreement with the people we need to have agreement with to be able to use drones to strike at the people that represent a threat.

Watch it:

A Pew poll (PDF) from July, 2010, found that 93 percent of Pakistanis who are familiar with drone strikes think they are a bad idea, and 56 percent of Pakistanis who have heard of drone attacks say they are unnecessary to defend against extremist groups. Ninety percent thought the strikes kill too many innocent people.

Last week, Pratap Chatterjee at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, reported on the death of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old Pakistani who attended a “Waziristan Grand Jirga,” an official meeting, to discuss the impact of drone strikes on local communities. Three days later, Aziz and his cousin were killed in a drone strike.

Opposition to drone strikes has become a popular political position in Pakistan. Last month, cricket legend Imran Khan held a rally with more than 100,000 supporters in which the opposition politician spoke out against U.S. drone strikes, telling the crowd:

Our leaders owned this war on terror for the sake of dollars. Let me curse you. You sold out the blood of innocent people.

Indeed, Romney is correct the U.S. has an “agreement with the people we need to have an agreement” in order to conduct drone strikes. But polling and popular politics in Pakistan would indicate that the Pakistani public is far from “comfortable” with the growing civilian death-toll from the CIA’s drone program.

Tariq Aziz (circled) attended a conference on drones in Islamabad (photo credit: Pratap Chatterjee)

The next day, Tariq and the other Waziris returned to their homes, eight hours drive away.

On Monday, October 31, Tariq took his cousin Waheed Khan to pick up his newly wed aunt, to take her back to Norak. When the two boys were just 200 yards from the house, two missiles slammed into their car, killing them both instantly.

‘I don’t see the logic and reasoning in killing two young boys,’ [Human rights lawyer] Shahzad Akbar told the Bureau. ‘We wanted to work with the youth, to include them in the search for accountability.’

Akbar is suing the CIA for killing innocent civilians through drone attacks in Pakistan. And Tariq’s father is reportedly in discussions to join the lawsuit. Akbar wondered why the CIA didn’t apprehend Tariq while he was in Islamabad. “If they were terrorists, why weren’t they arrested in Islamabad, interrogated, charged or tried?” he asked. Writing for the Guardian today, Chatterjee, who photographed and videotaped Tariq Aziz at the meeting in Islamabad, had a similar question:

The question I would pose to the jury is this: would a terrorist suspect come to a public meeting and converse openly with foreign lawyers and reporters, and allow himself to be photographed and interviewed? More importantly, since he was so easily available, why could Tariq not have been detained in Islamabad, when we spent 48 hours together? Neither Tariq Aziz nor the lawyers attending this meeting had a highly trained private security detail that could have put up resistance.

The CIA’s drone campaign has expanded significantly during the Obama administration. U.S. government officials say 1,500 suspected militants have been killed since President Obama took office while the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has examined every recorded drone attack in Pakistan and said at least 175 civilians have been killed.

The CIA “has had freedom to decide who to target and when to strike” and the White House is usually notified after the fact. However the Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Agency has tightened rules after State Department officials and military leaders “demanded more-selective strikes.” “The bar has been raised. Inside CIA, there is a recognition you need to be damn sure it’s worth it,” a senior official said.

I don’t think this means that you can’t make comedy about high-stakes things: in fact, sometimes I think comedy is a necessary way to critique our behavior in high-stakes situations. Humor doesn’t end when you get PTSD as a firefighter working at Ground Zero, or when you fight in Iraq. But I do think, if you’re going to work in these circumstances, that you have to be thoughtful and precise about what you’re saying is funny. The fact that we kill a lot of people indiscriminately with drones is not necessarily that funny. The way people cope with that fact probably is a rich vein to mine for black humor.

PM Julia Gillard and Former PM Kevin Rudd.

Australia moves closer to law establishing carbon tax

The Australian government’s goal of implementing a carbon tax passed its toughest test today as the lower house of Parliament overwhelmingly approved a package of bills that institutes a phased-in carbon tax, to be followed by a carbon-trading system.The 18 bills now go to the Senate, where the law is all but assured of passage in mid-November.

According to Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the system will reduce Australia’s carbon emissions by 159 million tons by 2020. Australia is the largest per-capita carbon polluter, with an economy deeply dependent on coal.

The first phase of the law will tax carbon at $22.90 a ton beginning in the middle of next year. The surcharge will rise modestly until mid-2015, when the carbon-trading system will take effect. Other bills call for a national emissions caps, exempting farming and other agricultural sectors.

The tax will not extend to the price of gas for consumers, although rail, shipping and large trucking businesses will pay the tax indirectly on fuels such as diesel.

Australia’s biggest carbon emitters — power companies, mining companies and industrial manufacturers — immediately attacked the legislation, and the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, vowed a “pledge in blood” to repeal the law should he become prime minister.

The Australian law would go well beyond what the California Air Resources Board is considering. The board voted in August to reaffirm its cap-and-trade plan, which put the nation’s first state carbon-trading program back on track.

JR:  Some good political analysis here:

Tony Abbott will have to stomach more carbon in his political diet

TONY Abbott may have made a “pledge in blood” to repeal the carbon laws passed yesterday but it is a promise that he will struggle to uphold in the face of significant barriers.He may be hoping to make these changes history but instead they threaten to be historic, regardless of personal views about carbon pricing and global warming.

With only half of the Senate up for re-election in two years, the odds of the upper house agreeing to reverse the tax this side of 2015 seem remote.

And by then the tax will be integrated into a world emissions trading system and businesses and householders alike will all be accustomed to paying for carbon emissions.

That means that the current partial business opposition to the tax which later morphs into an emissions trading scheme could melt away, particularly if the impact is smaller than the most vocal critics fear and is masked by more significant pricing factors such as swings in the Australian dollar.

That has been the experience in New Zealand, which, unlike Australia, applied its carbon tax to petrol, with the carbon price changes quickly becoming secondary to movements in the currency and oil prices.

Pakistan Floods Show Asia’s Vulnerability to Climate Change

It is more than a year since the devastating July and August 2010 floods in Pakistan that affected about 20 million people and killed an estimated 2,000. Many believe that the disaster was partially fuelled by global warming, and that there is a real danger that Pakistan, and the Indian subcontinent in general, could become the focus of much more regular catastrophic flooding.

Indeed, right now Pakistan is again experiencing massive flooding.  The UN asserts that, already, more than 5.5 million people have been affected and almost 4300 are officially reported dead, 100 of them children.

Last year’s calamity, in particular, highlights the  vulnerability of much of Asia to climate change, and has helped elevate this into one of the most important and pressing political and social issues in the region. Indeed, an increasingly prevailing view is that the impact of climate change could be worse in the region than all previous social, health and conflict disasters of the past.

Insiders: Obama Will Approve Keystone XL Pipeline This Year

Despite intense lobbying from environmentalists and opposition from many in President Obama’s own party, virtually all National Journal Energy and Environment Insiders say that Obama’s State Department will approve a controversial 1,700-mile pipeline project to bring carbon-heavy tar-sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas.

Environmental groups have been working in Congress and the courts to delay or block a decision, citing environmental concerns and, more recently, questions about the impartiality of some State Department officials.

But more than 70 percent of Insiders said they think the State Department will approve the Keystone XL project by year’s end. Another 21 percent said the administration would approve the project eventually, just not by the end of this year. Only 9 percent of those responding think the project will not get final administration approval. Because the project crosses international boundaries, the State Department is tasked with determining whether building the pipeline is in the national interest.

China’s Wind Market to Reach 158 GW by 2016

China outpaced the US and emerged as the biggest market for wind power capacity in 2010. China has approximately 44.7 GW of installed wind farm capacity and intends to reach 230 GW by 2020.

Various factors are expected to drive the wind epower market in China. Government backing and generation-based incentives for renewable energy sources, rising electricity demand, and Clean Development Mechanism support from the UN all are expected to boost China’s wind market.

China outpaced the US and emerged as the biggest market for wind power capacity in 2010. China has approximately 44.7 GW of installed wind farm capacity and intends to reach 230 GW by 2020.

Wind turbine blades are mostly made of composites because of the excellent mechanical properties and ease of designing. Composites consumption in the Chinese wind market was approximately 488 million pounds in 2010. Lucintel estimates that composites consumption is will reach 542 million pounds by 2016.

Report: Mercury levels mostly down in Great Lakes

A newly released report says mercury levels in the Great Lakes region generally have dropped over the past four decades, although concentrations in some fish and bird species have increased more recently.

The report was being released Tuesday at a news conference in Detroit. It sums up the findings of 35 recently completed scientific papers.

Scientists credit reduced air emissions in the Great Lakes region and nationwide for the drop in mercury levels in the lakes.

The report comes about a month before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to release tougher rules for emissions from coal-fired power plants, a leading source of mercury.

But despite the drop-off, the report says mercury pollution exceed thresholds for posing health risks to humans and the environment in many areas, especially inland waterways.